At 3 a.m. on Sunday, March 7, 1907, Upton Sinclair awakened to the smell
of smoke and cries of fire. He made his way outside in his half-burned
nightshirt and stood in the snow looking back at the flaming structure. With
increasing despair, he watched the "beautiful utopia flame and roar, until it
crashed in and died away to a dull glow."

It was Helicon Hall, the utopian paradise he started just four months
earlier. He had created it on the site of a former luxurious boys’ school with
swimming pool, bowling alley, theatre, and nursery located on seven acres near
Englewood, New Jersey.

Helicon Hall fulfilled his longtime dream—to build a utopian community
that would herald the virtues of socialism. He invested $30,000 he received from
The Jungle, his best selling novel about the Chicago stockyards. But his
dream turned into ashes.

He opened Helicon Hall on November 1, 1906, with twelve families and hopes
of eventually attracting hundreds more utopian-minded authors, poets, and
colleagues. Cynical journalists said Sinclair built it as a "free love nest"
just to have mistresses available. Despite the cynics, it was a successful
albeit brief experiment in communal living with the families cooperating and
upholding high moral standards, as Sinclair was quick to point out.

Sinclair defended the experiment, saying, "I have lived in the future."
Later he would note, "What other group ever raised a janitor to win the Nobel
Prize?" The janitor was Sinclair Lewis who worked at Helicon Hall.

There were nasty rumors that the hall was burned down to collect on the
insurance. In fact the insurance company paid off only about two-thirds of the
value and Sinclair paid all the other debts off himself. It was the end of his
Jungle fortune.

Disheartened by the tragedy, Sinclair retreated to Bermuda with his wife,
Meta, son, David, and a colleague, Michael Williams, one of the Helicon Hall
colonists, to form a two-family utopia. Williams and Sinclair collaborated on a
health book, titled Good Health and How We Won It, describing Sinclair’s
diverse diets and sometimes erratic eating habits. He was always looking for a
diet to help him "overwork." It was here, during the winter of 1907/08, while
recovering from the Helicon Hall loss, that he wrote a play—The
Millennium.

The Millennium was an abrupt departure from Sinclair’s
investigative expository form of writing. Unlike much of his writing, it was an
indirect demand for reform in the guise of science fiction. It was one of the
first, if not the first, of thirty plays Sinclair wrote—a pure fantasy, a farce,
a humorous vehicle to attack capitalism and to herald socialism. It also gave
him an opportunity to fantasize about the expectations he had for Helicon
Hall.

David Belasco, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his time, was intrigued by the
play and later told Sinclair he wanted to produce it "on an elaborate scale" for
Broadway. The possibility excited Sinclair since he wanted the money to fund
another utopian colony. Sinclair was so desperate to have The Millennium
produced that when Belasco asked him to make some changes, he encouraged Belasco
to change the play in any way he wanted, a rare concession from Sinclair. But it
was not to be. After making Sinclair wait for a year or more and a series of
broken promises, Belasco rejected The Millennium and produced a small
show he could put on the road.

The play was never produced or published in the United States and it went
through a series of name changes, from TheMillennium, to The
Chosen People: A Comedy in Four Acts, to TheMillennium: A Farce
Comedy of the Future, and finally to The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year
2000. Sinclair rewrote the play as a novel and it was serialized in
Appeal to Reason in 1914. He self-published it as a novel under the final
title in 1924. While Sinclair thought that all copies of the original play were
lost, as he notes in the foreword to the novel, the Lily Library at the
University of Indiana has some early drafts of the play, circa 1907.

If Upton Sinclair were alive to day he would be an internationally
renowned celebrity. His face and name would be as familiar to you as that of
Elvis Presley or Ronald Reagan.

Upton Sinclair would be a favorite cover boy for TheNational
Enquirer; he would represent the Left on CNN’s "Crossfire" program; he’d be
featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek as a rabble-rouser; he
would be a popular contributor to Harper’s,The Nation, The
Progressive, Village Voice, as well as the op-ed pages of The New York
Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times; he would be a
confidante of Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and other international heads of
state; he would fill lecture halls at university campuses throughout the
country; he would compete with Deepak Chopra as the nation’s health guru; he
would be a loquacious guest on "The Late Show With David Letterman;" he would
turn the Lanny Budd series into the greatest TV miniseries since "Roots;" he
would be a guest on the Art bell radio program discussing his Utopian vision and
Y2K; he would co-produce a high-tech film based on his novel, The
Millennium, with George Lucas; his website: http://www.uptonsinclair.com/, would
get thousands of hits a day; and, no doubt, Upton Sinclair would be a Hollywood
Square.

Sinclair surely had all the ingredients necessary to be an international
media star: he was the Quixotic crusader who fought every injustice he ever saw;
he was a prodigious author of both fiction and non-fiction books; he was a
propagandist for every lost cause; he was a poet; he was a playwright; he was a
practicing health faddist who wrote best selling diet books; he was a Socialist
who won the Democratic nomination for governor of California; he had one of the
most widely publicized divorce battles of his time; he knew and corresponded
with many of the greatest personalities of the time, including Joseph Stalin,
Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mahatma
Gandhi, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Lincoln Steffens, Bertrand
Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Louis Untermeyer, Luther Burbank, Eugene Debs,
John Dewey, Edwin Markham, H.L. Mencken, Eugene O’Neill, H.G. Wells, Norman
Thomas, Clarence Darrow, and D.H. Lawrence.

Yet, when Upton Sinclair died peacefully at the age of 90 in a nursing
home near Bound Brook, New Jersey, his passing was little noticed. A slim book
titled Upton Sinclair: Biographicaland Critical Opinions referred
to him as "A prophet without honor in his own country." The Folcroft Library
Editions published just 150 copies of the book.

Sinclair was the consummate media darling before the modern media were
around to create and pronounce him king of the celebrities.

Biographer Leon Harris summed up his life as follows:

"Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, and died November 25,
1968. Until 1905, he was an unknown failure. For forty years thereafter he was
America’s most important writer; that is, he was more responsible than any other
writer for the changing view Americans had of themselves, their rights, and
their reasonable expectations. But by the time he died, Sinclair was again
virtually unknown."Sinclair was born in near-poverty
conditions to a southern aristocrat mother who was a suffragette and to a
pot-bellied salesman father who drank himself to death. He was a precocious
child who taught himself to read by the time he was five years old. He started
City College of New York (CCNY) at the age of 14 and after graduation in 1897,
he entered Columbia University as a special student. By now he already was
supporting himself through his writing.

While at CCNY he observed a student who sold an article to a magazine and
wondered why he couldn’t do that himself. And he did, writing and selling
children’s stories, jokes, serials, and poems. But it was in 1897 when he
started at Columbia that he established the writing regime that would stay with
him for the rest of his life. He was writing 30,000-word novels weekly during
that period as well as attending classes. He wrote what he called "half-dime
novels" under the pseudonyms of Lieutenant Garrison and Ensign Clarke Fitch for
the Army and Navy Weekly from 1897 to 1900.

In the spring of 1900, he left Columbia, frustrated by the hypocrisy and
greed he saw there and in politics, rented a small cabin on Lake Massawippi near
Quebec, and wrote "the great American novel." Titled Springtime and
Harvest, it was the story of a "woman’s soul redeemed by high and noble
love." While publishers did not share his vision of the book, it set a precedent
that would also mark his writing career—he published it himself.

Undeterred by the criticism and rejection of Springtime, Sinclair
went on to write The Journal of ArthurStirling, a
semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1903; Prince Hagen, a fantasy
about greed and power on Wall Street, 1903; Manassas, a novel about the
Civil War, 1904; and A Captain of Industry, the rise and fall of a greedy
Wall Street entrepreneur, 1906. All of which were greeted with mostly negative
reviews and few sales.

It was not until his famed exposé of the meat packing yards in Chicago,
The Jungle, in 1906, that Sinclair started to receive the attention he
sought. Here again, however, he was forced to publish the book himself before a
publishing house would take it on. The Jungle ignited the moral outrage
of the nation and led to legislative reform including the creation of the Food
and Drug Administration.

With The Jungle, Sinclair had arrived. The New York
EveningWorld reported, "Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself
famous has there been such an example of worldwide celebrity won in a day by a
book as has come to Upton Sinclair."

His writing between 1908 and 1924 included novels: TheMetropolis, The Money Changers, Samuel: The Seeker, Love’s Pilgrimage,
Damaged Goods, Sylvia, Sylvia’s Marriage, King Coal, Jimmie Higgins, 100%--The
Story of a Patriot, and They Call MeCarpenter; plays: The
Nature Woman, The Machine, The Second Story Man, Prince Hagen, The Pot Boiler,
and Hell; and non-fiction books: The Fasting Cure, The Cry for Justice:
An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, The Profits of Religion, The
Brass Check, The Book of Life, The Goose-Step, and The Goslings.

But he hadn’t forgotten The Millennium. He brought out the original
play and rewrote it as a humorous science fiction novel with a message. As
happened in many other cases, the publishers rejected the book and he
self-published it in 1924.

In writing the first version of The Millennium in 1907, Upton
Sinclair looked forward to the year 2000 as a time when socialism might succeed.
However, it came about accidentally rather than through social protest or
revolution.

With biting sarcasm and caricatures rather than characters, Sinclair
depicts the zenith of capitalism with the construction of The Pleasure Palace, a
glittering half-mile high structure in the middle of Central Park. During the
grand opening of the towering building, a scientific experiment with radiumite
explodes killing everybody throughout the world except eleven of the people at
the Pleasure Palace. They escape the deadly rays by flying high in the sky in a
revolutionary 1000-mph aeroplane called "The Monarch of the Air!"

The fortunate eleven survivors, who represent various social classes,
struggle to rebuild their lives by recreating a capitalistic society. That
fails, along with several other inept efforts, and the survivors, led by Billy
Kingdon, a Socialist, create a successful utopian society on the lush grounds of
a grand country estate in the Pocantico Hills above the Hudson River.

In 1907, Sinclair’s visions of supersonic flight, laser guns, and nuclear
radiation, all were prophetic in nature and all have been realized. Of course,
the cataclysmic end of the world and the triumph of socialism over capitalism
have not yet come to pass.

Some of Sinclair’s better known books, written after TheMillennium, included Mammonart, OIL!, Boston, The Gnomobile (a
children’s book later made into a Disney film), and The FlivverKing. Eleven of his books, published between 1940 and 1953, portrayed a
fictional history of the world from the events leading up to World War I through
the end of World War II. They were called the Lanny Budd series and all of them
were best-sellers. They brought Sinclair the recognition he desired but had not
achieved since The Jungle. One book in the series, Dragon’s Teeth,
brought Sinclair the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1942.

In 1931, a prestigious group of 19 internationally renown academicians,
led by George Bernard Shaw, nominated Sinclair for the Nobel Prize in Literature
for his "outstanding achievement in the contemporary fiction of all lands, for
their mastery of fact, for their social vision, for consistent, honest, and
courageous thinking, for humanitarian passion, and for vitality and sweep of
creative art." Enemies of Sinclair joined with supporters of other candidates to
attack him and ultimately to deprive him the honor.

One key ingredient to Sinclair’s success was his exceptional work ethic.
Upton Sinclair easily was one of the most prolific writers in history from the
beginning of his career in 1897 when he was writing nearly a novel a week to the
end with the publication of his autobiography in 1962.

He would write four to six hours a day, day after day, wherever he was,
whatever obstacles he was facing. Altogether during his writing career that
spanned nearly seven decades, Sinclair would write more than 90 books, 30 plays,
and an unknown number of articles, stories, pamphlets, poems, etc.

Sinclair was a true Renaissance man when it came to writing. He wrote in
nearly every form—fiction and non-fiction, general and specific, from half-dime
novels to Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction. He wrote autobiographies, biographies,
reviews, critical essays, poems, plays, movie scripts, novels, as well as jokes,
proposals, manifestos, pamphlets, newspaper columns, scientific treatises and
histories, not to mention thousands of letters. His work was widely translated
into some sixty languages in a quantity that places Sinclair among the most
popular writers of all time.

Another factor contributing to his success was his extraordinary ability
to focus his thoughts and writing. His focus was on social justice and nearly
all his writing and actions resound of the struggle for man’s equality.

"My books come out of deep conviction, and it is no fun writing them—yet
when I have finished one, it is only a few weeks before I am walking up and down
in my garden, taking a new load of troubles into my
mind."Unlike other writers of the time, he did not write
about the way things were, but rather about the way they ought to be or about
people who were trying to change them."All my life I have tried to have something worthwhile to say, and to
write it so that the ordinary man and woman can get my meaning. … With political
freedom and economic justice mankind can abolish poverty and war from the earth;
we have the tools to do it, and all we need is the understanding. That
conviction runs through all my books, and everything I have written on every
subject."Sinclair was aware that his adherence to a single
theme, the fight against social injustice, and the occasional outrageous antics
he undertook to bring attention to his message, brought him considerable
criticism. He was once arrested for trying to read the Bill of Rights to
striking dock workers in San Pedro, California. When he told Albert Einstein
that someone had called his social protests "undignified," Einstein gave him a
large photo of himself with six lines of verse, inscribed in colloquial German.
Translated it read:

"Whom does the dirtiest pot not attack?

Who hits the world on the hollow tooth?

Who spurns the now and swears by the morrow?

Who takes no care about being ‘undignified’?

The Sinclair is the valiant man

If anyone, then I can attest to it."

It was signed, "In heartiness, Albert Einstein."

There are several explanations why Upton Sinclair didn’t achieve the
respect and success he deserved in the United States but did receive abroad.

First, and probably most important, he was a Socialist and proud of it. He
believed in Socialism as a solution to man’s problems, he wrote about the evils
of capitalism and the virtues of Socialism, and he practiced what he wrote. He
put his life savings into Helicon Hall, a utopian society, he ran for several
political offices as a Socialist, and he mortgaged his home to produce a film
about the plight of Mexican Indians.

His political views might have been chic in the early 20th
century and understandable and acceptable in the 30s, but they were not
acceptable in the late 40s and 50s. Despite the red terror that gripped the
nation as ignited by reactionary anti-communist senator Joseph McCarthy,
Sinclair adhered to his socialist beliefs.

Secondly, Sinclair was not a great writer in terms of style and
aesthetics. He wrote for the people, the masses, and not for the critics,
reviewers, or intellectuals. His experience in writing half-dime novels had
prepared him to write for the mass circulation audience. Sinclair’s easily
understood characters and plots were not fashionable at a time when authors like
William Faulkner and James Joyce were intriguing the critics with complex,
hard-to-understand characters and plots. He said that he always tried to have
something worthwhile to say and to write it so that "the ordinary man and woman
can get my meaning."

"I have written many kinds of books—novels, plays, pamphlets, treatises
on politics and economics, on religion and love and the art of life. I have even
written some poems, but not in the modern manner. It is always possible to
understand what I am trying to say."Indeed, Sinclair was a
populist not an aesthete. But above it all, Sinclair was a muckraker whose words
improved the lives of millions of people.

Critics rejected Sinclair on his failed aesthetic impact; Sinclair
rejected the critics because they failed to see his social impact.

Finally, Upton Sinclair recognized his own talents and was not loathe to
promote himself often to the point of even alienating some of his own friends.
However, he was quick to point out that while he sought publicity, it was "for
books and causes, not for myself." He wrote the first of a number of
autobiographies, the thinly disguised The Journalof Arthur
Stirling, at age 25, after publishing only one very unsuccessful novel,
Springtime and Harvest. On the title page of another autobiography,
Candid Reminiscences: My First Thirty Years, published in 1932, he
wrote:

"The story of how Sinclair came to write his novels; the story of his
marriage and his sensational divorce; the amazing spiritual and humanitarian
flowering of a boy of the streets into a genius; the names, dates and places
which his enemies have tried to keep him from giving—all is here, the whole
amazing, incredible story, told by the man who lived
it!"While thinking rather well of himself,
Sinclair didn’t hold a similar regard for the news business. His exposé of
newspapers, The Brass Check, took its title from the metal token paid to
whores after services rendered.

But for every critic of Sinclair, he also had those who recognized his
talents and respected his work.

Author Irving Stone thought Sinclair was one of the wisest and
best-informed men in the world. He said, "He has the great gift of penetration,
he stabs through pretence, sham, hypocrisy, double-talk and double-dealing like
a steel spoke through butter; but even more important than his knowledge and the
keenness of his international analysis, is the profound goodness of his
heart."

George Bernard Shaw told Sinclair, "When people ask me what has happened
in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the
authorities, but to your novels."

To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Upton Sinclair was "one of the greatest
novelists in the world, the Zola of America;" to Albert Einstein, who was later
named Time Magazine's "Person of the Century," Sinclair was "one of the
sharpest observers of our time;"

After reading The Jungle, Jack London said, "Here it is at last!
The book we have been waiting for these many years! The Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of wage slavery! Comrade Sinclair’s book, TheJungle! And what
Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for black slaves, TheJungle has a
large chance to do for the white slaves of today."

Sinclair Lewis said he was "enormously impressed" by The Brass
Check and astounded by Sinclair’s "ability to get so much done with only
twenty-four hours a day to do it in!"

Bertrand Russell said he admired Sinclair’s books and "got into trouble
with various Americans by quoting them as an authority on American
conditions."

Upton Sinclair was specially admired in other countries. Wondering about
the discrepancy between his status in the United States versus elsewhere in the
world, Sinclair once pointed out that American publishers sold a total of less
than three thousand copies of his novel, Sylvia’s Marriage, while his
British publisher sold more than a hundred thousand copies in a single year.

In his 1962 autobiography, Sinclair reminisced, "Little did I dream that
fate had in store from me the job of buying book paper by the carload, and
making and selling several million books; to say nothing of a magazine, and a
socialist colony, and a moving picture by Eisenstein!"

Nor did he dream what fate had in store for his legacy. Nearly a hundred
years after publication of The Jungle, it is still noted, cited, referred
to, and generally held up as a classic example of the Golden Age of Muckraking.
Others of his books are occasionally reprinted, including The Autobiography
ofUpton Sinclair, OIL!, Dragon’s Teeth, and now, The
Millennium.

And while the motion picture by Sergei Eisenstein, the Cecil B.
DeMille of his time, didn’t quite become the masterpiece Sinclair hoped for,
even now, more than half a century after it was shot, it may still become an
international motion picture spectacular.

Upton Sinclair first came into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian
film director of "Potemkin" fame, in the early thirties. Sinclair mortgaged his
home in Pasadena to finance an Eisenstein film. The goal was to make an
independent picture of the plight of primitive Indians in Mexico that Diego
Rivera had told Sinclair about. The working title was "Que Viva Mexico" and it
was a complete disaster. Eisenstein disappeared into Mexico for fifteen months,
shot some 35 miles of film according to Sinclair, and spent tens of thousands of
dollars supplied by Upton and his second wife Mary Craig.

Sinclair finally ordered Eisenstein to return to the states, got the raw
footage from him, and dissolved his relationship with the director under
unpleasant circumstances.

Frustrated and hoping to get some money back on his investment, Sinclair
unsuccessfully tried to persuade some of the major studios to produce the film.
Finally, he turned it over to an independent producer, Sol Lesser, who used one
segment of it to produce "Thunder Over Mexico." The film died at the box office
earning only about $30,000. In frustration, Sinclair finally turned the film
over to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Now a successful documentary film-maker and art historian, Lutz Becker,
may fulfill his own lifelong passion—to complete Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished
masterpiece, "Que Viva Mexico." Working with 52 cans of uncatalogued film
discovered in 1998, and 40 hours of unedited film at the Museum of Modern Art,
Becker may be the first to assemble and edit the raw footage.

In addition to the Eisenstein film, another Sinclair vision might come to
be. There is also the possibility that his magnificent eleven-volume Lanny Budd
series will one day be made into a film or television series as Sinclair hoped.
In the 1940s there was thought of optioning the novels as a starring role for
Tyrone Power at 20th Century Fox. In 1962, the series was optioned
for television but the deal reportedly collapsed because of Sinclair’s earlier
criticism of Henry Ford’s politics during World War II. Ford was to have been
one of the sponsors. In 1982, CBS was reportedly planning to produce the novels
as a miniseries and in 1986 the books were optioned for reprinting if the TV
series was produced.

In 1934, Sinclair changed his political registration from Socialist to
Democrat and gave up his typewriter for the soapbox. He campaigned throughout
California for the Democratic nomination for governor. His "End Poverty In
California" campaign struck a chord with voters during the depression and he
shocked the politicians, including Democrats, by winning the nomination. After
that it was all down hill. The Republicans and the media vilified Sinclair in
what historians say was the dirtiest political campaign in California history
until Richard Nixon’s "Pink Lady" campaign to defeat Helen Gahaghan Douglas in
1950. Sinclair was falsely denounced as an atheist, anarchist, Bolshevist,
Puritan, and Social Fascist and he lost his bid for governor to Republican Frank
Merriam.

Sinclair was not one to be defeated by failure. There was always another
social injustice to be fought and he would eagerly take on the next cause. In
1933, he wrote I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty: A True
Story of the Future—a description of his EPIC program.In 1935, he wrote,
I, Candidate for Governor—and How I got Licked—an exposé of the dirty
tricks and the influence of money used in politics.

His political endeavor was one of the ten lifetime achievements he cited
in the "Summing Up" of his 1962 autobiography:

The Jungle helped to clean and protect the nation’s meat
supply.

The Brass Check improved the newspaper business and led to the
formation of the Newspaper Guild.

His "Mourning Parade" protest at Standard Oil in New York ended
slavery in the mining camps in the Rocky Mountains.

He helped promote an interest in psychic phenomena and led to the
department of parapsychology at Duke University.

He helped organize the American Civil Liberties Union in New York and
founded the ACLU branch in Southern California.

He helped develop American democratic political and social ideas in
Japan.

His two books on alcoholism. The West Parade and The Cupof
Fury, brought needed attention to that disease.

He started the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, now the League of
Industrial Democracy, to inform students about the socialist movement.

His Lanny Budd series of book depicted world history of the years
from 1911 to 1950, were translated into a score of languages, and helped
enlighten people throughout the world.

The endless hours
of writing, the quixotic search for utopia, the rejection by publishers, and the
ridicule from critics all took its toll on Sinclair. One criticism that caused
him special grief was the accusation that Sinclair was a "parlor Socialist,"
writing about poverty while living a wealthy life.

In 1917, he responded to one such critic in a letter titled, "The Price I
Paid" published in Pearson’s Magazine in April. Sinclair charged that
media reports he was a "millionaire Socialist" were false. He said that writing
exclusively in the cause of human welfare and justice had cost him dearly.
Saying that he lived a fairly austere life, Sinclair pointed out that he had
never owned an automobile and rode a second-hand bicycle for which he paid ten
dollars. He said he could have been a millionaire if he had been willing to
eliminate socialism from his words and actions. Instead, he "stood by the
faith." While he would earn hundreds of thousands of dollars during his
lifetime, he would always spend more than he earned, most of it on his
"propaganda" for social justice.

He also pointed out that he sacrificed practically all his standing and
influence as a distinguished man of letters. Rather than being a much-respected
member of the intellectual caste, he was often perceived of as an agitator,
protestor, or, at best, a literary gadfly. He complained, "My name does not get
upon its wires (Associated Press) unless I am arrested, or divorce my wife, or
do something else considered disgraceful."

Sinclair’s turbulent life was marked by some spectacular successes and
marred by some personal tragedies. Perhaps the lowest point in his life came in
1961 when his wife, Mary Craig, died. Deep and abiding love for Craig is
recorded in the "memoriam" he wrote for the second edition of her autobiography,
Southern Belle:

"My beloved wife, wise, kind and lovely human soul, who guided my life
for forty eight years, went to her rest at the age of seventy eight.

She had written and published this book of memoirs. The choice of title
was mine.

This Memorial Edition has been prepared for free distribution to public
libraries of cities and towns; libraries of universities, high schools and
hospitals—anywhere over the world where people may be free to read the book. A
copy will be sent, as long as copies are available, postpaid, to libraries which
ask for it."

Upton Sinclair

January 1962

While The Millennium was
designed to amuse the reader, it was also meant to remind the reader that there
were distinct social classes in the early 20th century with some
people wallowing in unimaginable wealth and others suffering in unimaginable
poverty. Nearly a century later, Upton Sinclair’s words are as relevant to our
society as they were originally. originally. Ironically, critics who deign to
review this reprint of The Millennium will likely criticize and deride it
with many of the same words their predecessors used in the early 1900s. Before
Seven Stories Press agreed to publish this reprint, it was rejected by other
publishers and literary agents for "not having literary value."

Upton Sinclair concluded his final autobiography with an admonition to
mankind, saying, "He can only say what he thinks and hope to be heard. He can
only go on fighting for social justice and the democratic ideal, hope that man
does not destroy himself, by design or by accident, and trust that eventually
the peoples of the world will force their rulers to follow the ways of peace, of
freedom, and of social justice."

There are few authors in American literary history who had the passion for
social justice of Upton Sinclair. There are none who had the words to reach
millions of people throughout the world with that passion.

BIBLIOGRAPHYThe
Journal of Arthur Stirling by Upton Sinclair,

Upton Sinclair, Pasadena, California 1903; The Jungle by Upton
Sinclair, The Jungle Publishing Co., New York 1906; The Cry forJustice: An
Anthology of the Literature of

Social Protest edited by Upton Sinclair, The John C. Winston
Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1915; The Millennium: A Comedy of the
Year 2000 by Upton Sinclair, Upton Sinclair, Pasadena, California, 1924;
Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest by Floyd Dell, Albert and
Charles Boni, New York, 1930; American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences
by Upton Sinclair, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., New York 1932; Candid
Reminiscences: My First Thirty Years by Upton Sinclair, 1932;